Hi all. I wanted to make a thread to share my thoughts on Angband, and also to find out how everyone discovered it.

I've been a gamer since the tender age of, well, ever since I can remember. I've obviously played many games over my lifespan. I was always into adventure games, and have always been looking for the deepest, most complex RPG-type games I could find.

About a year ago, I found out about roguelikes one day while perusing the internet, and was instantly intrigued. I wondered how these types of games had evaded me for this long. They looked to be deeper and more detailed than any I'd ever played. I gave them a quick try, but for some reason, the awesomeness didn't kick in at first.

Months passed, and being increasingly jaded with mainstream game releases and they're lack of true gameplay, I once again decided to give roguelikes another go.

Then I found ANGBAND, and it clicked. I had found what I was looking for. This game is so deceptively simple, yet infinitely complex. I know I am basically telling all of you something you already know, but I wanted to put my thoughts out there for all.

i play hardcore d2 alot and like hardcore style game, id played doomrl and dwarf fortress but way back in the day someone told me i dont like diablo i play angband .. a few months ago after knowing about game name for years i dl and try it, is greatest game out, eek!

I got Moria...somewhere...I don't remember where. I was around 10 at the time. Lots of fun, though I had little clue what I was doing. Then awhile later I got "Angband 1.0", a Mac port of frog-knows, I think off of one of those "hundreds of shareware programs" CDs.

A workmate brought the borg screensaver in to work, and I got curious and downloaded it.

Sorry about getting you hooked.

I found Moria on a 3M employee bulletin board in 1990 (ya, I'm that old). It was before Al Gore invented the internet. Started playing then. Then moved to Angband 2.4 Frog Knows in about '92. I started maintaining the borg in 1995. I have been the borg (screensaver) guy ever since.

I first downloaded Moria and Angband from the Info Mac archives when I was in middle school (in the early 90's I think)... but I didn't really understand the game. I tried playing it off and on but only really figured it out in college (about 8 years later); I subsequently became obsessed with Cthangband.

EDIT: I just checked the MIT Info-Mac HyperArchive on the Wayback Machine and don't see Moria or Angband. I got them through some kind of Mac shareware page or disk... I just can't remember which one.

A friend at university introduced me to Moria, which was far more engrossing than the 8-bit sprite games of its time. I left university just before Angband was written, and discovered it on the recommendation of a fellow VGAPlanets player in 2000 (our correspondence had wandered off VGAP onto fantasy games we liked). I'm not quite sure how I failed to discover it for its first eight years.

I remember seeing Moria being played by one of my friends at his dorm, but forgot about wanting to try it out. Then in the mid- (early?) 90-ies another friend introduced me to the old variant FAngband IIRC, (not to be mixed up with the "recent" variant FAangband) and played it for a summer or so.

It's not until 1997 I got really hooked on Angband and have played it on and off ever since then. I mostly played Zangband early on, but tried out most other variants of course, later on NPP was the default, but now vanilla is about it when I play ... which I do periodically. Can't stay away for long.